Mind Hacking - Sir John Hargrave

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The first few months of sobriety were unbearable, and so was I. Every day was a roulette wheel of emotion: I could be furious, anxious, sulky, moody, or depressed, often simultaneously. One thought, however, slowly began to sprout a little bud of hope. What if there was a way to reprogram my mind?

Programming is in my blood. One of my earliest memories was my father taking me to visit the computer lab at the university where he worked. In my mind, the college's mainframe computer stood illuminated by a shaft of divine light, with a choir of angelic voices. In reality, it was probably fluorescent light, and the whirr of industrial air conditioning units. But the effect on me was no less profound: somehow, that moment implanted a little seedling of geek into my tender, eight-year-old uterus. Please don't ask me why I had a uterus.

My father approached the resident computer programmer, a heavyset man with a large, walrus-like mustache. "Ronald, this is John," my father introduced me.
"Hey." Ronald looked down at me, tape reels spinning in the background. (I might be mixing up some details of this story with a series of TV commercials for Control Data Institute.) "What can I do for you?" "Can you create a punch card with John's name on it?" my father asked.

"Sure." Ronald handed me a card, a little larger than an index card, with small rectangular holes punched out. It seemed to glow in my hands, a cryptic piece of alien technology. It was mind-blowing to stand in that computer lab, among those massive, mysterious machines that required a swimming pool of coolant to keep them from overheating. I had the distinct feeling that in here was another world. I lost the punch card, but I'll never lose that memory.

When the cost of your own computer -- your very own computer! -- finally became affordable, I would pore over computer catalogs like earlier generations of kids would fantasize about Red Ryder BB Guns. I drooled over the latest machines with sexy names like "TRS-80" and "TI-99/4A," the pages of my catalogs stuck together with saliva and nerd sweat. I begged, cajoled, and badgered my parents, until they finally bought me the legendary Commodore 64, the computer that changed my life.

They didn't just buy me a computer, they let me keep it in my room. There I began programming with a vengeance. There wasn't much to do in my hometown, so I immersed myself in the secret language of computers, teaching myself the basics: flowcharts, algorithms, variables, loops. I was lucky enough to get in the first programming class taught at my middle school, and by the end of the semester, I was teaching the teachers.